Volume 13, Number 2: April/May 2007

Page 2 – The Vice Provost for University Libraries reflects upon the strides made in the last year. Page 3 - Ornithologist David Sibley’s Edwin Way Teale lecture is featured. Page 5 - In a guest column on diversity issues, Professor Hedley Freake examines what UConn is doing to engender cultural understanding in students. Page 6 - Staff anniversaries and awards. Page 7 - Finding articles, images, and music easier with new database locator.

A Question of Title: Property Rights and Asset Values

This paper examines the impact of land title systems on property values. The predominant system in the U.S., the recording system, awards title to claimants over current possessors, whereas the Torrens registration system awards title to the current owner. In theory, the registration system maximizes property value, all else equal, but in practice, the systems differ depending on the risk of a claim and administrative costs. A natural experiment in Cook County, Illinois, where both systems have existed since 1897, allows a test of the theory. The results, based on commercial and industrial properties, reveal that parcels tend to self-select into the two systems based on the predictions of the theory.

Some Law and Economics of Historic Shipwrecks

This paper examines how US and proposed international law relate to the recovery of archaeological data from historic shipwrecks. It argues that US federal admiralty law of salvage gives far less protection to historic submerged sites than do US laws protecting archaeological sites on US federal and Indian lands. The paper offers a simple model in which the net present value of the salvage and archaeological investigation of an historic shipwreck is maximized. It is suggested that salvage law gives insufficient protection to archaeological data, but that UNESCO's Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage goes too far in the other direction. It is also suggested that a move towards maximizing the net present value of a wreck would be promoted if the US admiralty courts explicitly tied the size of salvage awards to the quality of the archaeology performed.